CAPM Business Analysis Frameworks Practice Question
A business analyst is facilitating a requirements workshop for a new HR onboarding system. Attendees include the HR director, two recruiters, an IT security officer, and a payroll supervisor. The HR director dominates the discussion and repeatedly redirects every topic toward executive reporting dashboards, while the recruiters' process concerns go unrecorded. Which facilitation technique should the business analyst apply to ensure balanced input before documenting requirements?
⚠ Common exam trap
The trap here is assuming that any group-based elicitation technique automatically balances participation, when only structured turn-taking formats prevent one stakeholder from monopolizing the discussion.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Round-robin brainstorming, where each participant contributes one idea in turn before open discussion resumes.
Balanced elicitation in a facilitated workshop requires a technique that structurally guarantees each stakeholder a voice. Round-robin brainstorming does exactly that by rotating contributions in sequence, neutralizing a dominant participant and surfacing the recruiters' process concerns before the group moves to open debate. The other techniques either defer elicitation, target attitudes rather than requirements, or assume dispersed experts, so they do not solve the in-session imbalance.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Delphi technique, where participants answer anonymous questionnaires over several rounds until consensus is reached.
Why it's wrong here
Delphi is a consensus-building technique typically used with geographically dispersed experts or to reduce the influence of dominant personalities. Here all participants are in the same workshop and the goal is immediate balanced elicitation, not multi-round anonymous convergence. Applying Delphi would delay the session and abandon the live discussion the workshop was convened to conduct.
- ✗
Focus group, where a trained moderator probes the group's perceptions and attitudes about the onboarding process.
Why it's wrong here
A focus group is designed to gather qualitative perceptions and attitudes, not to balance participation among stakeholders with unequal speaking power. The HR director's dominance would persist under a focus group format because it relies on open group dialogue. It also produces attitudinal data rather than the structured process requirements needed to document the onboarding system.
- ✓
Round-robin brainstorming, where each participant contributes one idea in turn before open discussion resumes.
Why this is correct
Round-robin brainstorming gives every attendee a structured turn to speak, which directly counters a dominant participant. Because the recruiters are invited to contribute in sequence, their process concerns surface before the HR director can steer the conversation back to dashboards. It is a recognized facilitation technique for equalizing participation and produces more complete requirements inputs for the onboarding system.
- ✗
Nominal group technique, where the analyst privately interviews each attendee after the workshop and merges the notes.
Why it's wrong here
Post-workshop private interviews are a legitimate elicitation approach, but they are not the nominal group technique and they do not fix the in-session imbalance. The scenario asks what to apply during the workshop so the recruiters' input is captured before requirements are documented. Deferring everything to later interviews risks losing detail and does not manage the dominant stakeholder in the room.
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JA
Written and reviewed by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
Last reviewed September 2026 · checked against the official PMI exam blueprint
This CAPM practice question is part of Courseiva's free PMI certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the CAPM exam.